Book Reviews: Internationalism
Doing Difference Differently: Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordances
Zhaozhe Wang. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press. 2024. 212 pages, including index.
Index Terms—cultural diversity, ecological affordances, international students, literacy practices, transcultural context
Reviewed by Jiawei Gao, Student, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China
The embedment of institutional discourse of cultural diversity has become ubiquitous worldwide as global flows of peoples, capitals, materials, and cultures continue to accelerate. This discourse, though intended to inclusively characterize international individuals, often muffles their individualized voices in a transcultural context. In Doing Difference Differently: Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordance, Zhaozhe Wang challenges these constraints, unfettering multilingual writers from stereotyped attributes. He demonstrates how these individuals, specifically four Chinese international students at Wabash University in the US state of Indiana—Manna, Wentao, Yang, and Bohan—are afforded by ecologies and assemble their resources to distinguish themselves from institutionalized identity categories.
In this book “difference” refers to socially constructed attributes that predict behaviors and frame experiences, while ecology concerns the material and sociocultural environment in which individuals underline their differences. To understand how people do differences against the institutionalized structure of cultural diversity, Wang uses an ethnographic case study approach to analyze the students’ literacy practices and experiences on and off campus. The study interprets the students’ literate activities under a complex network of ecological affordances—structural, semiotic, experiential, social, bodily, and material—revealing how they neutralize the impact of institutional climate, doing differences differently.
Doing Difference Differently begins by setting the scene with the widespread adoption of institutionalized discourse of cultural diversity in American educational institutions, and then introduces the theoretical framework and methodology guiding the subsequent examination. Chapters 2 through 5 delve into the detailed accounts of four Chinese international students, unfolding how they leverage ecologies, negotiate meanings, and (re)define differences against an array of constructed attributes through varied approaches in the linguistically and culturally foreign educational context. Following the analysis of four participants’ literacy practices, Chapters 6 and 7 demystify the problematic mechanisms underlying the discourse of cultural diversity, underlining how ecology affordances empower students in their individualized practices of doing differences. Wang concludes by calling for cultivation of a critical sensibility that appreciates the dynamic nature of difference: a reflection of individuals’ literacy practices in diverse contexts rather than a static ensemble of fixed traits. This book also emphasizes that how people do difference is inherently “different:” involved in miscellaneous relations, people are agentive decision-makers capable of exploiting situated and dispersed affordances to practice differences with personal inclinations.
This book powerfully illustrates the interplay between one’s perceptions of differences under the institutionalized forces of cultural diversity and one’s practices of differences afforded by ecologies and influenced by personal choices in transcultural settings. The combination of ethnographic case studies with a holistic theoretical scaffolding provides an excellent model for intercultural and literacy studies. The reconceptualization of difference advocates for a dynamic and critical perspective on how international communities navigate and enact difference.